In today's oil and gas industry, wells that are deviated are most common and more often than not, deviated to horizontal—meaning an inclination of about 75-90 degrees. There are a number of established plays that utilize mass planning and targeting for horizontal drilling like the SAGD (steam assisted gravity drainage) in Canada and the Marcellus, Hornriver and Barnett shale gas plays. In order to optimize the number of wells to completely exploit one of these plays, companies are planning hundreds, and in some case thousands, of wells for an entire asset in a defined area, which is often very time-consuming and requires numerous resources. There are therefore, numerous types of resource plays that require horizontal laterals to be positioned and spaced to fill either a regular or irregular shape lease or unit boundary. Two specific plays that utilize the placement of horizontal laterals are shale and heavy oil plays. The objective is to maximize the coverage within this area based on lateral constraints, such as min/max lateral lengths, lateral spacing and heel/toe, heel/heel or toe/toe spacing. In SAGD (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage) applications, these laterals are in pairs with the upper lateral being the steam injector and the lower lateral being the oil producer. Companies often rely on conventional technology to help accomplish this objective and as a result are often limited with respect to the number of scenarios that can be analyzed. Once the drilling operation has commenced and information from wells being drilled are coming in from the field, engineers, once again, rely on conventional technology to update the plan based on actual data and are limited in their options for redistributing the remaining laterals. This process can easily take months to complete depending on the size of the field and the number of wells that are being planned.
There is therefore, a need for a more efficient process that will significantly reduce the cost of planning horizontal wells by reducing the time to plan their horizontal laterals within a limited pre-defined boundary while addressing the same concerns addressed in the conventional process.